Gardner mansion shelters ghostly past

Saturday

Jul 20, 2013 at 6:00 AM

By Eric Stanway, CORRESPONDENT

GARDNER — There's a haunted house in this city. Not one of the goofy, Halloween, scary-fun varieties, but a genuinely creepy old mansion. Standing incongruously on Broadway, it looks exactly like some place where the Addams Family would set up shop, with lofty bay windows, huge towers and balconies, and more ornate gingerbread than you can shake a stick at.

Locally known simply as "The Victorian," its reputation goes back many years in area lore, as area residents regale each other with spine-chilling tales of the various spirits said to occupy the site.

The house was built in 1875 by furniture magnate Sylvester K. Pierce, directly across the road from his chair factory. In the nearly 140 years since, it has been visited by tragedy many times.

"When we moved in, we had no idea of the history of the house," said Edwin Gonzalez, who bought the property, along with his wife, Lillian, in November 2008. "We were coming in from Boston. At the time, I had the opportunity to work from home for the first time, so we had the luxury of living wherever we wanted in Massachusetts."

As it turned out, this particular sequence of events allowed Mr. Gonzalez's wife to indulge a lifelong passion.

"Lillian has always wanted to own a Victorian house," he said. "It goes right back to when she was a young girl, and would pass an old mansion on her way to school. Of course, in Boston, a house like that would set you back two or three million dollars. One day, her sister came upon this amazing house in Gardner. Well, we were shocked at the price, which was significantly lower than what we would have paid in Boston. I immediately called the Realtor and told her I was interested in the property at Number Four West Broadway. There was some hesitation on the other end of the line, so I repeated the address. At that point, she asked me if I really wanted to see the house. I thought that somewhat odd — I wasn't thinking in terms of paranormal activity at that point — and assumed there must be some structural issues with the place."

Three days later, the couple stepped into the house for the first time.

"Lillian fell in love with the place immediately," said Mr. Gonzalez. "Well, once she makes up her mind, there's not a lot I can do about it. The Realtor did mention something about it being haunted, but we didn't really believe in ghosts, so we paid little attention."

Once they started moving in, however, the couple discovered there was definitely something amiss with the house.

"Things started to happen the moment we began bringing in boxes," Mr. Gonzalez said. "At first, it started innocently, with things moving about. We paid it little mind."

In April 2009, however, events took a distinctly more disturbing turn, as the spirits began ratcheting up their activity.

"I was sitting in my office, which had originally been the nursery," Mr. Gonzalez said. "It was about 5:00 in the afternoon, and I was sitting at my desk, when I had the image of a man appear right in front of my face. At the beginning it was a black spot in the corner of my eye — the equivalent of someone swinging their hand around. I put my hand up to protect myself. The event dramatically affected me."

In short order, Mr. Gonzalez began to record the times and frequency of these events, to see if there was any correlation that might explain their appearances.

"They would take place at any time of day," he said. "Sometimes in the morning, sometimes in the late afternoon, frequently at night. Eventually, I discovered that what they had in common was that they would become more active around the time of the full moon."

One of the more notorious areas of the house was an area known as the "red room," where, it was alleged, a client had killed a prostitute.

"One of the mediums who was here, in a trance, actually attacked another member of the group, claiming he resembled this individual. It's said that the man who was here harbored a deep hatred of women. As it is, many females have a hard time breathing in this room, while the men feel nothing at all," Mr. Gonzalez said.

Mr. Gonzalez said that tragedy had visited the family on several occasions, including a young girl who had drowned in a pond behind the house, and another girl, by the name of Rachel, who perished there in 1918, when she was 5.

"Sylvester Pierce had three sons, of which Edward was the eldest. He passed way back in the 1960s," he said. "I spoke with a previous owner, who had lived here for a long time. She met Edward at that time, when he was an old man, and he often talked of seeing the spirit of his mother in the hallway."

According to Mr. Gonzalez, Sylvester Pierce married twice. His first wife died of a bacterial disease that destroyed her face and hands. After she died, he married again, to a girl two decades his junior. This created a considerable amount of friction in the family, as the woman and her stepson vied for supremacy in the family.

"There was a lot of bickering in the family," he said. "Back then, the eldest son had a lot of influence on the property, and that didn't work well."

In the mid-1960s, the property changed hands, as Edward Pierce lost the property in a poker game. The winner felt so badly about it that he gave the former owner a room in the cellar. It appears, however, that the area is still occupied.

"A lot of people pick up something very negative in the cellar," Mr. Gonzalez said. "There are shadows, and the sound of children laughing down in the cistern."

There is another spirit, that of a Finnish immigrant by the name of Eino Saari, who died on April 3, 1963, in a fire that decimated the second-floor master bedroom. Witnesses say they can hear him wandering around the room at night.

In June 2011, Mr. Gonzales found himself faced with a whole new phenomenon.

'I was working in my office, when I saw a moving truck pull in next door," he said. "Two boys were running around the yard, one about 8, the other 5. I noticed the younger boy kept looking up at the window, which I thought was kind of odd. The second day, he was out there again, doing the same thing. On the third day, his mother, Katy, came by and asked how many children we had. I told her we didn't have any kids, and she was puzzled. She told me that her son — Joshua was his name — had told her he had seen a boy on the second floor, dressed in white. The boy had asked him to come in and play with him, as his mother wouldn't let him go outside."

Eric Perry, of the Central New Hampshire Paranormal Society, has spent a fair amount of time in the house himself, and concurs something definitely is not right about the place.

"I've been there four times so far, and I'm going back again in August," he said. "Each time we've visited the house, we get bits and pieces of information — shadow people, voices, EVP recordings and footsteps in the red room. I was down in the cellar, and I heard the voice of a young boy say, 'Come play with me' on two separate occasions.

"I believe the house is situated on a ley line. That's a kind of paranormal highway. But it goes further than that. To the left of the grand staircase, there's actually a portal, leading between dimensions. If you go there, you can feel it physically pulling you back."

Eventually, the situation escalated to the point where the couple just couldn't handle it anymore.

"One night, Lillian went down into the basement, apparently sleepwalking, and began digging in the cellar," Mr. Gonzalez said. "She started feeling sick whenever she was in the house. She would go into the yard, feel better, then it would start up again."

In desperation, Mr. Gonzalez decided to have the building blessed, but that turned out to only exacerbate the situation.

"For three nights, Lillian stayed downstairs," he said. "On the third night, she was lying there awake, when, at about midnight, she started screaming that something was on top of her and was begging me to take it off."

At that point, Mr. Gonzalez determined that the events in the house had escalated beyond his control.

"I began seeing an image of a woman in one of the upstairs windows, while Lillian was strangely affected," he said. "I decided then and there that I just didn't want to deal with it any more, so we packed up and got out, leaving about 80 to 90 percent of our stuff at the house." The couple now live in an apartment in Gardner.

Since that time, the house has attracted more than its share of paranormal investigators, including the "Ghost Hunters" from the SyFy channel.

Mr. Gonzalez says he is using the proceeds from these investigations to fix the roof, which is badly in need of repair. He returns to the property to host these explorations, but he and Lillian have opted to stay elsewhere for the indefinite future.

"I'm still amazed by what I encountered in that house," said Mr. Gonzalez. "We just can't move back in."